We are scratching our heads on how to regulate the digital space – NITA Official

Chief Technical Officer at the National Information Technology Authority (NITA), Solomon Kofi Richardson, has disclosed that regulating the digital space has not been an easy task for regulators like  NITA because they are now trying to understand the space well in order to proffer appropriate and effective regulations.

When you come to NITA you will find that we are now scratching our heads on how to properly regulate this space,” he said at the recent MTN Business CTIO Roundtable Africa 2023, where he was one of five panellists who discussed how to leverage digital transformation for development.

The forum, organized by MTN Business Ghana, is a thought leadership initiative, for industry experts to discuss key issues around digital transformation and also to create the top-of-mind awareness that MTN is moving from a telco to a techco and what that means for various stakeholders within the ecosystem.

Solomon Richardson told participants at the forum that on several occasions, people have approached NITA to find out if they had regulations for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Bitcoin and other modern technologies, but the truth is that NITA is still trying to understand that space well before coming up with regulations.

The technologies keep coming up but very often we as regulators need time, sometimes up to two years to understand them before we can regulate them,” he said.

This goes to confirm the recent assertion by the President and CEO of the MTN Group, Ralph Mupita that technological advancement has outgrown regulation/regulators in Africa, so, regulators need to rise up to the occasion keep up the pace.

He noted that most of the industry regulations on the continent are targeted at regulating ‘voice’, meanwhile the industry is fast becoming a digital one, with telcos like MTN, for instance, becoming techcos and platforms on which several stakeholders in the ecosystem can plug and play.

As the world continues to undergo major digital transformation and disruption, our regulatory frameworks need to evolve to reflect these technological advancements,” Ralph Mupita said.

Recently in an interview with Techfocus24, an official of a leading Africa-focused Fintech painted a rather unfortunate picture of how easy it is for companies like his to obtain licenses in Europe than in Africa where their platforms facilitate the transfer of billions of dollars of remittances.

It takes a maximum of three months to obtain a license in any European country, and that one license gives you access to all other European countries, but it takes a minimum of two and half years to obtain a similar license in and for just one African country, meanwhile the license is meant to facilitate inbound transfers to Africa,” he said.

It would appear that the delays are largely due to lack of sufficient understanding of the space, by persons who work in regulation, and that has been the reason why African countries are usually very late in rolling out new technologies.

Indeed, another issue that came up strongly at the forum is the penchant of African regulators to collect revenue in the form of fees, charges, levies and fines from industry players more than creating the enabling environment for the industry to thrive.

ICT4D to DEP 

Solomon Richardson however noted that government’s 2003 ICT for Development (ICT4D) policy has run its full course and NITA is now developing a new and relevant policy called the Digital Economy Policy (DEP), which will position NITA to come up with the appropriate regulations to create the enabling environment for the industry to thrive.

We wish to assure industry players that NITA’s style of regulation will move completely away from a profit-oriented one to an enabling-oriented one,” he said. “In that respect we acknowledge that the expertise we need to development effective regulations are with you the industry players so we are consulting extensively on the development of new regulations,”

He also said under the DEP regime, a Companies ID Database will be created by the Registrar-General Department, just like National Identification Authority has captured individual ID and created the Ghana Card.

According to him, once the Companies ID Database is created, it will be integrated via an API to all private organizations to make it easier for every institution to check the background of any company they do business with.

This will prevent the situation where some companies make misrepresentation about what they do and what they are capable of when dealing with other businesses or individuals,” he said.

He said government is also working on establishing a Digital Governance Framework, that will spell out the format by which data is shared between institutions across all sectors, to ensure proper management of data within the digital space.

We are also looking at what model of Digital Sovereignty we want – whether we should ensure that all data on our people should be stored in Ghana, like in some jurisdictions, or we can allow some data to be stored elsewhere like in other jurisdictions,” he said. “We need to know what the implications of each model is so we can choose what is best for the country.”

At this stage, data protection in Ghana is virtually non-existent. Virtually any and everybody is able to access data on Ghanaians for any purpose without real controls.